So recently i’ve finally gotten my homemade / homebuilt Lulzbot mini working. And it’s working pretty good. The most critical problem i was facing was that my 3d printer would start printing either too close to the heat bed (or if i added extra bed leveling washers) it would print too far away. This was a critical problem as the first few layers are the most important and if you can’t get you prints to stick to your print bed then the rest of the print will usually unstick and fail. Thanks to some helpful people on the Lulzbot forum i was able to adjust my z-offset to the correct height that worked for me.

The second issue is that recently i’ve noticed my large and tall prints failing miserably at a certain height and the filament not coming out thick enough and the top gets all cob-weby like a spider web, but worse. Apparently this is called “Heat Creep”. The problem in part may be caused by the tiny blower fan on the Lulzbot mini not providing enough cooling and heat slowly rising in the hot end until the filament actually melts too soon and cannot be extruded properly. This makes sense as the problem only occurs after a long time printing. So the logical step was to replace the tiny blower fan (or squirrel fan) with a larger fan that will do the job. The new Taz 6 has obviously taken that tiny fan into consideration and has changed it to a large 40mm fan.

EDIT: The failing on large prints may be due to me using a half-size stepper instead of a full size stepper motor for the extruder. This means too much voltage is being applied to the motor and it is getting super hot. Over time this means the motor looses steps and probably causes my printing problems.

Unfortunately the Taz 6 x-carriage and modifications are not a drop in replacement for the Lulzbot Mini i decided to make my own. This is what i came up with and it seems to work beautifully. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1587110

I have only tested this on HIPS so far, but it has eliminated the heat creep i was getting with HIPS. PLA apparently suffers more from heat creep problems than other filaments, but this mod will likely help with PLA heat creep issues as well.